UC Davis lab monkey thought to have died in drain

A small monkey that escaped from a research lab at UC Davis two weeks ago is now believed to have died in the drain system, university officials said.

"Her fate wasn't a pleasant one," said UC Davis spokeswoman Lisa Lapin on Wednesday. "It makes a lot of us sick, frankly. We want to take good care of our animals. A lot of the people at the primate center have been in tears."

The 2-year-old monkey was intended for breeding purposes at the research lab, home to more than 4,200 monkeys, and was "disease-free," university officials said.

Opponents of a proposed high-security lab on campus had seized upon the monkey's disappearance to question whether the university could safely manage a lab that would contain the world's most lethal diseases and organisms, including smallpox, anthrax and the Ebola virus. They said they feared that an animal with a deadly infectious disease might one day escape.

UC Davis is among half a dozen institutions around the country to apply this month to the National Institutes of Health for a grant to build the proposed $200 million Western National Center for Biodefense and Emerging Diseases. Monkeys for the lab, which would be the only Biosafety Level 4 center on the West Coast, would be supplied by the campus' primate center.

On Wednesday, some opponents of the Level 4 lab questioned whether the monkey was indeed dead.

"How terribly convenient," said Samantha McCarthy, a member of Stop The UCD BioLab NOW. "The university said earlier they thoroughly looked through the sewer system. They still can't tell us what happened."

The university had used fiber optics to scan the sewer and performed a low- pressure flushing in search of the primate. University officials said a higher- pressure flushing will be conducted in hope of recovering the monkey's remains.

"In the 40-year history of the primate center, this was an unprecedented situation," Lapin said. "We've never had an animal missing or disappeared -- 82 animals have gotten out of their enclosures but they were immediately recovered."

In recent days, the animal handlers who last saw the monkey underwent a sophisticated computer voice stress analysis, a type of lie detector test. The Yolo County District Attorney's Office and experts from Florida verified the employees' accounts, Lapin said.

The primate center has begun a review of existing security procedures.

"Internal security has not been a focus up until now," said director Dallas Hyde. "The disappointment is pervasive that our ability to care for our animals has been questioned."

Security at the proposed Level 4 lab would be far more stringent, said university spokeswoman Lapin.

"Some people are very angry and fearful and want to make an issue of the monkey," she said. "They are not related in any way. At the lab, there would be 10 security points that someone would have to pass before being in a room where there are infectious diseases."